[Chapter-delegates] Invitation: ISOC at ICANN78 reception (really Taiwan)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 03:05:33PM -0700, Charles Mok (gmail) wrote:

>For us, ISOC, I find that if we follow the ISO 3166 basis for ccTLDs as our
>nomenclature for country names

That is not what I said.  What I said was that the reasoning in RFC 1591 provides the quite correct observation that there is an actual UN agency responsible for determining these matters, and the UN seems to be competent to decide what is and isn't a country and what the official names of those things are, and we are not.  Therefore, we follow the only standard there is for this question, and we use that. 

>have to, right? If we follow the convention in ICANN GAC, then it would be

I have no idea how the convention in ICANN GAC emerged, but since they're not a standards body I don't know what the basis would be for following their practices rather than anyone else's.  Do you have some information about how the GAC settled on this variation from UN practice?  Do you know how long ago that change happened?  (I don't, and a casual glance at the GAC pages don't tell me.)  What I can see is that when various IDNA strings were assigned to TWNIC in 2010, ICANN still used the official UN name for the country in its report.  I don't know whether that comported with GAC advice at the time.

>should worry about that anyway. So why not? Or if we really want to follow
>ISO 3166, why not just list by the two-digit code, e.g. TW, CN,
>US, whatever, and we don't have to get into this unnecessary argument,
>right?

We try to use the two-letter code whenever we can, but it presents usability issues for people picking their country name from a list if they happen not to be familiar with ISO 3166.  As for why not, it is because doing anything except following ISO 3166 puts the Internet Society (and, let's be honest, it's someone on the staff of the Internet Society who'd have to do this) in the unhappy position of having to decide what the right name is for something and then accepting responsibility whenever they made a mistake.  Whereas if we use the actual international standard for these things, we have some basis for our selection that isn't, "I did what I thought best."

>After all, in the case of this reception at ICANN, should ISOC really care
>which country someone comes from to join, other than some
>statistical purpose?

We have to care where people are from because we are incorporated in the US and therefore have to comply with OFAC restrictions.

Best regards,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Sullivan, President & CEO, Internet Society
e:sullivan at isoc.org m:+1 416 731 1261
Help protect the Internet for everyone:
https://www.internetsociety.org/donate/